Gems of the Genre: The Maze Runner Series

When I was a child, I got lost in a corn maze. And it wasn’t a happy fun corn maze like this:

They’re not even trying to emphasize this pun.

It was a shit-your-pants corn maze like this:

Let me just go change my pants.

So, obviously, I took every opportunity to tell the story of my near-death experience, and my quick thinking in an incredibly dangerous situation. Because bragging about your bravery is how you make friends.

What you’ve never heard of that?

Guess that’s why you don’t have friends.

So until last year I totally thought that I was a living legend surviving that maze unscathed. But then I read The Maze Runner.

Dammit. These guys totally stole my thunder!

So let me give you a rundown of the plot, here. This is kind of that classic storyline. You know the one where a 16 year old boy wakes up in a windowless elevator remembering nothing but his name, and then the elevator opens up into a glade where there are like 50 other boys who only remember their names, and they are in the middle of a giant maze that changes shape everyday and there are giant gooey monsters with metal spikes that like to really slowly and painfully pull apart teenagers?

You know?

There is a fine line between good fantasy and ridiculous fantasy. The very best fantasy is constantly testing that line. But James Dashner totally sprints right over that line, laughing, flinging off his clothes, and giving the finger to all those losers back there too afraid to cross it. He runs, free and ridiculous, like a nudist in an outlet mall, babbling about vegan cookies and hemp. You watch from a distance, may even for a second consider joining him, but then someone calls your iPhone, inviting you to see Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and you leave James Dashner, running naked in a field, spewing profanities and conspiracy theories, and you go and watch James Franco and some monkeys. Oh, I’m sorry; apes.

That extended metaphor does have a meaning, I swear.

Ok, let me rephrase. A few years back I watched 300. This movie contained a lot of the fantastical, but it was very clear from the beginning what the limits of this were. Though there were monsters and magic, man was still mortal and, though their arms were thicker than my neck, they were bound to the constraints of human physical capacity. Meaning they can’t throw a spear from a mile and a half away and have it go straight through someone’s chest.

Oh...wait...

Did somebody throw that? DAMMIT, 300!

I couldn’t respect the movie anymore. It had crossed the boundary of what I was willing to believe, and had gone into it’s own fantasy world, not bothering to bring the audience along for the ride.

And this is exactly what James Dashner does in The Scorch Trials.

As you can see, this is the sequel to The Maze Runner, and it just sucks. Which actually really shocks me. As you may have noticed, very few young adult books stand alone. They have sequels, prequels, companions, encyclopedias, fan fiction, you name it. And, (excluding fan fiction), every piece of the series is generally just as good as any other. Look at Harry Potter. There isn’t one Harry Potter book that is definitively better than any other.

So the supreme suckiness of The Scorch Trials really surprises me because I loved The Maze Runner. Loved it. It’s a flippin’ gem! And The Scorch Trials is one of the worst young adult books I have ever read.

Lemme go ahead and give you some examples.

I realized pretty early on that I was in for a headache. So, the main character, Thomas, wakes up in a hotel room in a post-apocolyptic city, with a crazed and diseased man trying to break through his window:

“Sores and scars covered his thin, sunburnt face. He had no hair, only diseased splotches of what looked like greenish moss. A vicious slit stretched across his right cheek; Thomas could see teeth through the raw, festering wound. Pink saliva dribbled in swaying lines from the man’s chin.

‘I’m a Crank!’ the horror of a man yelled. ‘I’m a bloody Crank!’”

Come on, James Dashner.

If you really want us to know about a cool (not that cool) word that you’ve decided to call those that are infected with the dumbass disease you’ve invented for this book, there are lot more subtle ways to introduce it than having a character yell it as they try to attack the protagonist. It’s literally the first thing the man says. That would be like if I was trying to rob a bank and I run up to the teller window and yell “I have slight anemia!”

...So that was dumb.

Also, this book was just gratuitously violent. Like, over the top with the teenager killing. In horrible horrible horrible ways. Yes, The Maze Runner is violent but not this violent. This level of violence makes me question Dashner’s sanity. I mean, at one part, a kid gets hit by lightning, his leg is blown clean off, all his clothes are completely burned off him, his eyes have melted out of his head, and the boy is still alive. Still. Freakin. Alive. And conscious. Another time, they were in a completely dark passageway, couldn’t see a thing, and a boy has a boiling blob of metal land on his head, burning his skin off as it drips down around his face, then hardens around his head like a bowling ball, and decapitates him.

Ok so I’m 20 and this gave me nightmares. This book is intended for TWEENS.

Dashner you go too far!

So I absolutely recommend The Maze Runner. Definitely one of the better young adult science fiction novels I’ve read. But please don’t continue in the series. The third book, The Death Cure, (idiotic title) is coming out next month, but I’m not even gonna bother marking my calendar as I will certainly not be wasting my time with it.